


Epicure

by VergofTowels



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Fever, Fever Dreams, Hannibal Rising References, Injury, M/M, No Character Death in this Fic, Post-Season/Series 03, Recovery, Sickfic, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 05:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20652233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VergofTowels/pseuds/VergofTowels
Summary: According to the philosophy of Epicurus, fear of death is at the root of human neuroses and one should strive for a life that is peaceful because of the freedom from fear.Hannibal is struggling to keep his thoughts together after the fall, taking care of his incapacitated lover while slowly succumbing to the ravages of his own wounds.  The surrounding silence of winter is full of imaginings he would rather put to rest.





	Epicure

**Author's Note:**

> This story makes reference to Hannibal's backstory as written in Hannibal Rising, however you do not need to have read the novel to read this fic. Also, I'm completely handwaving the timeline because the show is set in a time several decades after the novel and therefore Hannibal wouldn't have lived through WWII. Shhhh.... this is all self-indulgence.

Silverware polish spots the tabletop, soaking into the wood in places where the dark varnish is peeling. Hannibal draws a fingernail along the wood grain and it comes up tacky. He rubs the residue away between his fingertips, face impassive but inwardly frowning. Seventeen spoons, lined up like fallen soldiers along the edge of the table, reflect back his profile in the dim light. The polish hasn’t quite managed to take off all the patina, and each pitted and discolored silver round seems to say, “beggars can’t be choosers.” Hannibal scrubs the last spoon with an oil-dirtied handkerchief.

It is close to 4 PM. The windows in the cramped kitchen are smudged with age and rimed with frost. The falling snow outside dims the setting winter sun into a pale silver coin, giving the old house a ghostly submarine glow. In the downstairs hallway, the grandfather clock tick-tocks slightly out of time, sounding strangely muffled. Hannibal pushes his thumb into the curve of the spoon. His hands smell like polish now; the whole kitchen does. The rest of him smells like sweat and blood and antiseptic, masking the unpleasantly sweet stink of infection. He closes his eyes. The spoons are part of one reality. When he opens his eyes, he is part of another.

Florence. Standing on the Ponte Vecchio, listening to the vendors hawk their art and jewelry, imagining the smell of the butcher shops that originally lined the bridge, stewing in the perfume and body odor of the tourists. Closed in on either side by the storefronts, cold in a winter breeze, face lit warmly by reflected firelight from wrought-iron lanterns. Looking out over the water at the graceful arches of the Ponte Santa Trinita. Remembering a rough little dog waiting for handouts at his feet. Remembering a craving for Chianina beef and human liver and fresh olive oil. Imagining the feeling of slim and strong hands on his waist. Imagining the taste in his throat of aftershave with a ship on the bottle.

Will cries out from the bedroom. Hannibal rises from the table, folding the handkerchief. Eighteen spoons on the table’s edge like uniformed corpses. He hears Taps ringing in some other life as he walks away from them.

_“Tutto bene,” _Hannibal says in the bedroom, smoothing his hand along Will’s fevered brow, pushing his wet bangs away from his pale and beautiful face. Saintlike in the firelight, Will rests with his head back, throat bared, eyelids flickering with nightmares. So exquisite. St. Francis of Assisi in ecstasy, or St. Sebastian. He bears the wounds on his body grandly; they are red in the yellow light. The hollows of his bones and his ruined cheek are heavily shadowed, Carravaggian, painted delicately with a thick brush. Hannibal runs a hand over Will’s cheek, his jaw, that throat. He closes his fingers around the pulse point and leans in close. When he can’t find his English, he murmurs in Italian. _Precious. Mine._ Sometimes, _you brought this on yourself._ But Hannibal can’t summon any anger. He bathes his Will with cold water and meditates on the nature of love and how it’s taken almost everything from him.

Some days are better than others.

There’s no television in this house, but Hannibal has a radio. He carries it around with him when he’s working. He listens to NPR and staticky strains of opera as he changes the oil in the truck. It has been many years since the last time he had to do this, but he hasn’t forgotten how. He forgets very little, even the things that are better forgotten. He sings along to _E lucevan le stelle _under his breath, perfectly pitched but voice cracking with disuse. He was never a singer. That doesn’t matter to his audience of air and snow. He taps his fingers along the truck’s hood, pressing phantom harpsichord keys, until it’s too cold to stay outside. 

Hannibal chops firewood with an axe half-dulled by weather, but the blows are rhythmic and soothing. Not so long ago, he used an axe to fell a glorious red dragon. What he’s doing now bears little resemblance to how he imagined the life of a knight triumphant, but he minds the spoons: beggars simply cannot be choosers. He’s been through worse; he lived for three years in his mind, waiting for his foolish heart. He bends to pick up the split logs and falls to a knee. The pain is startling still, sometimes, and the twist of the gunshot wound in his stomach knocks the breath out of him. He doesn’t make a sound. He has been through _much_ worse.

Mischa watches him from behind the wood pile with her big, dark eyes. Her little hands rest like snowflakes wherever they fall. The wide, open fields around Hannibal seem to close in on all sides, dizzyingly, like the rooms in Mischa’s dollhouse. She smiles at him. After a long moment, soaked with snow, he struggles to his feet and goes inside. She isn’t real.

Will talks in his sleep frequently, making querulous pleas for succor or calling names that don’t mean anything to Hannibal. He doesn’t share the bed anymore. It’s hardly wide enough for one of them to begin with, and Hannibal doesn’t need another elbow to the stomach. He almost killed Will for that – knife to that beautiful throat, shaking and sweating in a haze of pain and sleep. What a waste that would have been. He still feels sick remembering it now.

He stays in the chair at Will’s bedside and dozes. He delegates himself to watching over. Will requires a lot of attention. They’re running out of medicine. Hannibal starts breaking the painkillers in half, then he stops taking them himself altogether. It’s better when Will sleeps through the night.

Hannibal doesn’t sleep much. He walks the streets of Florence, visiting the Duomo in his mind, visiting the Pazzi family chapel, researching Dante and Sforza and Graham. Other memories intrude. He lets the fever find him in his weaker moments when his hands tremble from wiping pus away from his sutures. _A curious physical reaction for a surgeon_; so his brain narrates to him as he looks through his cowardly fingers at the angry red lines. They flicker in his vision like the dying fire in the grate. He doesn’t ever look too long or he sees faces inside the flames, some he recognizes.

It starts to snow and it doesn’t stop for days. The wet flakes gather quickly in drifts and make the world silent. Hannibal keeps the doorways clear with a yellow plastic shovel as best he can, but if he stops and sleeps for an hour, then the snow starts to get too heavy to lift without seeing stars. He washes Will’s body and feeds him broken pills and drinks a truly terrible bottle of wine that was left by the previous occupants of the house. He swirls the liquid around and takes in the bouquet out of habit, but it doesn’t help. Notes of vinegar, and they aren’t subtle.

A black dog comes on the third day of snow. Hannibal sees it out of the corner of his eye from the attic window. The shadowed lupine shape stands out against the fields like an inkblot devouring paper, an absence of light. Blankets smelling of mothballs slip from Hannibal’s (coward) hands when he sees it. Ice crowds his gullet. “Perkūnas.” It’s the name of an old, old god he remembers from childhood stories. It’s the name of a black dog. He goes downstairs to make sure that Will is still breathing. He can’t tell if the howling he hears is coming from the dog, the wind, or himself.

Will stirs in his nightmares and gasps Hannibal’s name. Hannibal kisses his forehead and holds his hand through the long night, fingers intertwined. 

_Oh, what would he say if his ever-rational father could see him now?_

It doesn’t really matter now. His father’s brains were eaten by wolves. He dreams about them steaming in the snow on a night like tonight, jellylike and pink with blood, and the smell of burning metal and rubber, and the smell of gunpowder and death. He is grateful, when he wakes, that the acrid taste of vomit banishes the imagined texture of grey matter on his tongue. 

Hannibal knows he’s seeing things. He sees the wolves in the trees at twilight, disappearing between the pines, disguised by the heavy branches mounded with snow. Ghosts in the long night. He sees tracks at the doors, circling the house. Each toeprint tipped by a claw mark. And then there are the boot prints, too. It varies from hour to hour whether he thinks they belong to the FBI or to the _Hilfswillige._ The thought that either one has found them fills him with a desperate sense of purpose; he stands in front of Will’s bed with a knife in hand, watching the doorway for hours. He knows no one is coming in. _Physician, heal thyself._ The shadows still feel like monsters even when he knows they cannot be.

He sees the black dog again. Outside, it walks with Mischa, stalking her steps. She moves with childish grace, plays like violins between the drifts. The strings are dogged by French horns. _Petya i volk._ Notes spill from his mind into the waking world. Hannibal wants to go to her, to lift her from the snow, to feel her tiny, star-shaped hands on his face. Her hair is long and curling in her face. Her smile is like the sun. He reminds himself often that the pain in his arm is from his fall into the sea, not from reaching after her and having the barn door slammed closed on him.

She disappears when he rushes outside to her, stumbling without shoes. Down to his knees again in the snow. _She isn’t real._ The sun is fading from the world. Look inside the belly of the wolf and find it swallowed alive.

In the evening (some evening, what day is it) Hannibal runs hot water over his wound, looking into the ugly, puckering skin, shivering and sopping up the pus. It’s very cold. Has he brought in enough firewood? Breathing is a labor and his mouth is dry, like he’s sucking on wool. He reminds himself that he’s been through worse and lies back down on the floor. (This is getting to be pretty bad.)

Maybe the dog is here for him? 

He never thinks about what comes after. He thinks about his earliest memory and projects forward to what he imagines will be the moment of his death. He didn’t imagine he would be dying of a septic gunshot wound, laid out on greying tile in a borrowed bathroom. Something more glamorous would have suited him better. An aneurysm at the height of a crescendo. Being crushed to death under a crystal chandelier. Or, indeed, falling from a cliff with his darkened and debauched lover in an unwitting murder-suicide.

_But they lived._ They lived to decline. Hannibal feels tears wetting his face. He doesn’t want to go yet. He finally has what he wants. He closes his eyes. Some time passes in darkness and the sound of surf, no, the sound of the river Arno washing against the Ponte Vecchio. Prokofiev playing. Salt smell of prosciutto, olive oil. Someone is touching his cheek.

“Mischa?”

“Shh,” says Will. “I’m here.”

\---

Will is half-silhouetted against the bedroom window, hair long and falling into his face. He’s very thin, swimming in a sweater pulled from one of the room’s dressers, but his eyes are clear. His cheek isn’t healing very nicely, but at least it’s healing. Hannibal tries to reach for Will, but his arm won’t move. Broken by the barn door? He’s struck by the thought that this is a dream, that all of this has been a dream he created in the white, geometric interior of his cell at Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane - maybe he’s finally, actually gone insane? Then Will is there, gently freeing his hand from the heavy bedclothes and taking it between his palms.

“Hey,” Will says, attempting a smile. The scar pulls at his lips. The warmth in his gaze is genuine. “You’re back.”

_“Dove sono andato?”_ Hannibal asks, or thinks he asks. _Where did I go?_ Will tilts his head, and after a moment Hannibal realizes he didn’t understand. His mind roves over letters and words, picking them up and putting them down like seashells collected from a stormy shore. By the time he finds the right ones, he’s forgotten what he wanted to say. It doesn’t matter; Will has leaned down to kiss him softly. Their mouths meet for the first time, and a feeling rises in Hannibal’s chest, a warmth, a pressure that settles in his throat. He takes Will’s wrist in a tight grip. “_Non lasciarmi,”_ he says, curses his fumbling tongue, but the meaning this time seems clear. Will rests their foreheads together.

"I’m staying, Hannibal.” Will squeezes his hand. “This time we’ll be together.”

Some days are better than others.

Hannibal doesn’t enjoy taking over the role of “the bedridden.” He doesn’t enjoy the weakness in his limbs or the ache of his unused muscles. He sleeps, struggles, sleeps again. He sicks up ill-gotten antibiotics and oversalted chicken broth patronizingly spoon-fed to him by a frustratingly patient Will. There are long afternoons when he can do nothing but listen to the fire or the radio, alone. He chafes in the emptiness, resents his dependence. The Florence in his mind is full of unintended associations now, and he hides from them elsewhere, poring over medical texts in the Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins or listening to the Goldberg Variations playing endlessly on loop at the Bach House in Eisenach. He dreams of Mischa often, but he doesn’t see her anymore, and this is a kindness.

He sees the black dog again. After days of recumbency, missing Will, he pulls himself up, finally, from the confines of the bedroom and is determined to sit in the kitchen. At least it will be a change of scenery. He can take in the silver sunlight and polish the spoons. He can advise Will on how to make a proper bowl of soup, with silkie, red dates, and goji berries; it will fall on deaf ears, he’s sure, and anyway, all the food they have is in cans. Still, he can’t abide the idea of eating like this forever. Will will have to learn to cook. Hannibal crosses the den, one hand on the wall for support, tracing the faded flower pattern of the dated wallpaper. And there’s the dog, sitting in the kitchen doorway, forelimbs stretched out before it like Tutankhamun’s Anubis Shrine.

Hannibal must make some sound (of fear, potentially, though he prefers to think dismay) because Will comes down the stairs at speed, somewhat dusty and trailing an extension cord.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says, “It’s okay.” He touches Hannibal’s shoulder, then goes to the dog, half-crouching, to take it by the scruff. “I found her outside. Good girl. This is Hannibal. See? She’s really friendly!” He half-smiles up at Hannibal with a note of pleading in his voice. “I thought we could keep her.” His eyes look very blue today in the silver winter light.

Hannibal swears under his breath in Russian like the stable hands used to. They have no room for a dog in this house. There might be space enough, but the corners are crowded with fears and doubt, the threat of capture lurks under the windows, the future flees through every crack. They can barely feed themselves from what they have. And every time Hannibal looks at the dog, he sees death waiting for them. He doesn’t say that part out loud – cannot. It’s the spiraling clamor of his dying mind; it’s a thought that should be discarded. He looks at the dog and he looks away.

Will makes a show of listening very seriously to his concerns – the ones that make sense, the ones Hannibal can give voice to – his blue eyes wide and attentive. He doesn’t say anything. As Hannibal starts to wind down, tone going ever so slightly bitter, Will rests his chin on the dog’s head. All innocence, all charm. He will never belong fully to Hannibal.

“Her name is Sadie.”

Will, Hannibal, and the dog stay in the house until Hannibal can stay up for the whole day, carry a backpack, bear the close touch of a jacket over his stomach. Until there are no more instances of lost words or confusing nights when Hannibal forgets where he is and tells Will to bar the door against looters and worse. They don’t talk about that. Instead, they talk about leaving. It turns out that Will has found an old computer in the attic, stashed away under a worn pile of clothes, and he’s been fixing it up in the between hours. With a little bit of elbow grease and the unintended generosity of unknown neighbors with an unsecured wireless signal, they have internet access. 

It feels strange to broach the outside world again. The submarine atmosphere of the old house pops like a bubble full of smoke and spills them into the resumption of time.

News sites are still talking about them, some more vociferously than others. They were tracked to the cliffside by dogs and crime scene analysis, but vanished altogether thereafter. Freddie Lounds has pitched a daring helicopter escape to Cuba. They’ll be going north, then. Jack appears suddenly on CNN in a three-minute feature segment and scares them both, like a specter bursting suddenly from a darkened closet. Jack doesn’t think they’re dead, and they’re not, and they shouldn’t linger.

“Time to go,” Will says, after they’ve packed up the truck. The back seat is full of all their scavenged wealth: the blankets and clothes and cans and the last of the medicines, all they can fit and find use for. Sadie sits in the footwell, resting her chin on the center console and slowly wagging her tail. Will gets into the driver’s seat. “Where to?”

The sun is setting and the trees are casting wide nets of shadow over the fields in front of them. The interior of the cabin smells like cracked leather, old smoke, and the ghost of a pine-shaped air freshener. Will smells like soap and healthy sweat and mothballs. Hannibal kisses his jaw. All they have is now. All they have is each other, a truck, and an ominous black dog. 

“Wherever you want to go, beloved.”

**Author's Note:**

> Mischa's death in the novel comes at the the hands of the Hilfswillige, who were, very simply put, Nazi soldiers recruited from the indigenous populations of the countries invaded by Germany. Many were Soviets who volunteered to escape torture in German POW camps. In Hannibal Rising, it's made clear that the men who killed Mischa were seeking money and power with the SS and were known to the Lecter family household in the years before her death.
> 
> Info about Perkunas and black dogs in Baltic imagery was taken from an article in the Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences that discusses Günter Grass's novel Hundejahre, here: http://www.lituanus.org/1973/73_1_05.htm#Ref
> 
> Other works referenced include the opera Tosca (which I was inspired to include after reading about it in a fic by MissDisoriental), Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, the paintings of Caravaggio (love him, go look at them), Bach's Goldberg Variations for harpsichord (a favorite of Hannibal's from the books), and the Anubis shrine found in King Tut's tomb. I love writing for Hannibal; I can just stick stuff in everywhere. :D


End file.
